Scientists have discovered a striking new species of horned dinosaur (ceratopsian) based on fossils collected from a bone bed in southern Alberta, Canada. Wendiceratops (WEN-dee-SARE-ah-TOPS) pinhornensis was approximately ...

For more than 30 million years after dinosaurs first appeared, they remained inexplicably rare near the equator, where only a few small-bodied meat-eating dinosaurs eked out a living. The age-long absence of big plant-eaters ...

Burke Museum paleontologists have published a description of the first dinosaur fossil from Washington state. The fossil was collected by a Burke Museum research team along the shores of Sucia Island State Park in the San ...

The discovery of a pigeon-sized dinosaur with bat-like wings has exposed bizarre twists in the early evolution of birds, said scientists in China Wednesday whose conclusions were immediately challenged.

Although closely related to the notorious carnivore Tyrannosaurus rex, a new lineage of dinosaur discovered in Chile is proving to be an evolutionary jigsaw puzzle, as it preferred to graze upon plants.

(Phys.org)—A team of workers at Britain's Natural History Museum in London has used 3D scans of the bones of "Sophie" the most complete Stegosaurus skeleton ever found, to calculate the dinosaur's body mass at death. In ...

A perfectly preserved amber fossil from Myanmar has been found that provides evidence of the earliest grass specimen ever discovered - about 100 million years old - and even then it was topped by a fungus similar to ergot, ...

(Phys.org)—A pair of researchers with Brown University used X-ray video techniques to capture the way a guineafowl makes tracks as part of a project aimed at learning more about preserved dinosaur footprints. In their paper ...

Dinosaur

Dinosaurs (Greek: δεινόσαυρος, deinosauros) were the dominant vertebrate animals of terrestrial ecosystems for over 160 million years, from the late Triassic period (about 230 million years ago) until the end of the Cretaceous period (65 million years ago), when most of them became extinct in the Cretaceous–Tertiary extinction event. The 10000 living species of birds may be classified as dinosaurs.

The term "dinosaur" was coined in 1842 by Sir Richard Owen and derives from Greek δεινός (deinos) "terrible, powerful, wondrous" + σαῦρος (sauros) "lizard". It is sometimes used informally to describe other prehistoric reptiles, such as the pelycosaur Dimetrodon, the winged pterosaurs, and the aquatic ichthyosaurs, plesiosaurs and mosasaurs, although none of these animals were dinosaurs. Through the first half of the 20th century, most of the scientific community believed dinosaurs to have been slow, unintelligent cold-blooded animals. Most research conducted since the 1970s, however, has supported the view that dinosaurs were active animals with elevated metabolisms and numerous adaptations for social interaction. The resulting transformation in the scientific understanding of dinosaurs has gradually filtered into popular consciousness.

The 1861 discovery of the primitive bird Archaeopteryx first suggested a close relationship between dinosaurs and birds. Aside from the presence of fossilized feather impressions, Archaeopteryx was very similar to the contemporary small predatory dinosaur Compsognathus. Research has since identified theropod dinosaurs as the most likely direct ancestors of birds; most paleontologists today regard birds as the only surviving dinosaurs, and some suggest that dinosaurs and birds should be grouped into one biological class. Aside from birds, crocodilians are the only other close relatives of dinosaurs to have survived until the present day. Like dinosaurs and birds, crocodilians are members of Archosauria, a group of reptiles that first appeared in the very late Permian and came to predominate in the mid-Triassic.

Since the first dinosaur fossils were recognized in the early nineteenth century, mounted dinosaur skeletons have become major attractions at museums around the world. Dinosaurs have become a part of world culture and remain consistently popular. They have been featured in best-selling books and films (notably Jurassic Park), and new discoveries are regularly covered by the media.